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This abstract was last modified on March 21, 2023 at 9:37 p.m..
At Illinois Wesleyan University we sought to discover new bacteriophages for the host Microbacterium foliorum and compare them to those that we isolated using the alternative hosts Rhodobacter capsulatus and Ruegeria pomeroyi. In total the 11 students of this year’s class isolated 18 phages; 11 for M. foliorum, 6 for R. capsulatus, and 1 for R. pomeroyi. These phages were then examined and characterized using a variety of techniques including plaque morphologies, particle morphologies, host range, PCR, and ultimately genomic sequencing. Of our 11 M. foliorum phages only one was found to have podovirus morphology while the rest had siphovirus morphology with icosahedral capsids. PCR analysis revealed one of those 10 to likely be a member of the EB cluster and with genomic sequencing we found out that we had three additional phages that were members of the EE, EF, and ED2 clusters. Our phages from R. capsulatus showed much less diversity with 5 of the 6 all being from the same cluster. The one from R. pomeroyi had a notably unique prolate capsid and is most similar at the genomic level to a R. capsulatus singleton. Using variety of bioinformatic analyses we have continued to compare these new viruses to each other and to already-known isolates and these findings will be presented.